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Note from Beth: I’m publishing this post from 30,000 feet in the air flying my favorite airline, Virgin America, enroute to Washington, DC for Give the Max Day. (If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, you’ll know that this isn’t my first inflight blog post). As I was boarding my the plane, my colleague Jennifer Aaker, co-author of the book, The Dragon Fly Effect reached out to me about the plight of Amit Gupta who needs a bone marrow match. When Jennifer’s book launched last year, she and her co-author and husband, Andy Smith also announced their plans to go to India to help establish a bone marrow registry. At the party, you could get your check swabbed and fill an application for the registry – it took ten minutes and I hope you’ll consider it too – after your read this post below.

Can Social Media Save Lives? Guest Post by Porter Gale

Earlier this week, I first learned about Amit Gupta and his story from a twitter post. A friend of Emily Olson, co-founder of foodzie.com, sent me a tweet asking for help getting a Virgin America ticket donated for his friend who needs to travel for a bone marrow transplant. Getting the place ticket was easy. One email to David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America and he graciously agreed to help out. Finding the perfect bone marrow match for Amit Gupta is the real challenge. Amit, a member of the San Francisco tech community, has leukemia. He is also South Asian, a population that is dramatically under-represented in existing bone marrow registries. At present, many of the registries don’t have the resources to target populations that are difficult to reach.

What I’ve seen unfold over the past several days is a passionate community, using a variety of digital communications to help Amit find the bone marrow match that he desperately and immediately needs. The community is rallying and hopes you’ll join the registry, tweet and forward this article to your friends to help Amit, and others, find a match. Marketing guru and author Seth Godin posted a story on his blog; Michael Galpert joined in, both urging others take a cotton swab test by simply registering here: bit.ly/swabacheek. The test is painless, and in fact the technology developed for bone marrow transfers has dramatically improved in the last decade, making bone marrow transfers much easier — if one is lucky enough to find a match (more information can be found at www.marrow.org). There is also a hashtag dialog on Twitter under the tag #iswabbedforamit.

In the meantime, the dialog about Amit bubbled up on another network – fueled by another email chain. A bunch of thought leaders, technology folks, digital influencers and venture capitalists are headed to Puerta Vallarta for an invite-only conference. Turns out the group of heavy hitters aren’t just drinking margaritas. Digital guru Gary Vaynerchuk, who has over 900,000 Twitter followers, is hosting a social media session Friday with Andy Smith, the author of The Dragonfly Effect on ‘socialchangeinabox.’ The goal? To find a perfect match for Amit.

Meanwhile, a team at Stanford University is running a bone marrow event with cheek swabbing for Amit today and next week (@100KCheeks) and helping universities across the country run similar simple events through DoSomething.org. Cheek swab parties and events are bubbling up from Berkeley to Ohio. The group at Stanford is being lead by Professor Jennifer Aaker who is also co-author of the Dragonfly Effect, a book that looks at the positive impact of social media and who we can harness it for good. Jennifer and the Stanford student team are dedicated to getting 100,000 people signed up for the national bone marrow donor registry. Specifically, they are seeking to address the severe shortage of South Asian donors in the registry. And, in that process, hopefully save the life of at least one person.

So today is the day you can do some good with your social media tools. Help Amit and others find a match with a tweet, a blog post, an email forward. Go ahead, give G+, Facebook or your Tumblr a workout. And then get a cheek swab. Let’s use our digital tools and do some good.

Porter Gale Porter Gale is former VP of Marketing at Virgin America. She is a pubic speaker, marketing and social media expert and contributor to AdAge and The Huffington Post. Porter is working on a stealth start-up that will hopefully launch next year. She can be reached at @portergale

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[…] To be crystal clear about our message and call to action, we hope you’ll visit bit.ly/swabacheek right now to sign-up on line or http://www.amitguptaneedsyou.com to find a cotton swab event near you. Your tweets and retweets are working to spread the word. According to Peoplebrowsr, from October 1st to October 13th, stories about Amit had 4,236 mentions, 2,674 retweets and a total reach of over 13,258,947 people on twitter. Amit’s original post has been Tumbld over 7,300 times. This caught the attention of bloggers, and soon enough, Amit’s story was featured by the likes of Seth Godin, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Laughingsquid, Flickr, Kottke.org, and Beth Kanter. […]